I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.

I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.

  • Veritas@lemmy.mlEnglish
    334·
    2 years ago

    My biggest concern with the increasing number of people is that any interesting threads will be buried beneath memes, pictures, and similar content, like it happens on Reddit.

    • Sun-Spider@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      2 years ago

      I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it’s own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don’t yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.

      • captainteebs@lemmy.mlEnglish
        81·
        2 years ago

        This is what I am hoping will happen. With the current reddit structure, for each topic, you have multiple communities -

        1. The noob-friendly one that is not actively moderated and has a lot of reposts and garbage content
        2. The offshoot that was created because the main sub went downhill. Has stricter moderation and content policies.
        3. The meme offshoot that was created because the main sub banned memes.
        4. The circlejerk version.

        /r/gaming is garbage, /r/games is for discussion. /r/StardustCrusaders is a fan-art dump, /r/Shitpostcrusaders is a meme juggernaut The mods of the Game of Thrones subreddit wouldn’t allow people to shit on the show, so /r/freefolk was formed, and that also served as a template for stuff like /r/titanfolk.

        Anything that gains critical mass will break down into multiple sub communities. It’s inevitable.

        • Deebster@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I like this model, although circlejerk can be the meme version too. Even a fairly quiet sub like /r/baduk/ begat /r/badukshitposting/ and it works well.

      • Veritas@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1414·
        2 years ago

        Nah, most subreddits are the same. All the top threads in each community are usually pictures, memes, or news. It’s hard to find discussions unless you specifically search for not so popular posts.

        • PureTryOut@lemmy.mlEnglish
          52·
          2 years ago

          Can give you some examples? That is definitely not my experience, the few subreddits I visit often only have memes every once and while and they often get removed quickly by the mods redirecting them to dedicated meme subreddits.

            • hadrian@beehaw.orgEnglish
              42·
              2 years ago

              Sure, when it’s r/all by top. But a massive part of it is subreddits, which then constitute the front page. The majority of my Reddit front page isn’t memes, because my main subscriptions are things like acting, patientgamers, askhistorians, piano, etc. Which don’t have many, if any, memes posted.

              • Veritas@lemmy.mlEnglish
                91·
                2 years ago

                Ok, it’s not a problem of the majority of Reddit but of the most popular subreddits and the front feed.

                • hadrian@beehaw.orgEnglish
                  51·
                  2 years ago

                  Yeah I totally agree with that! I think it’s a basic side effect of the way the voting algorithm works - namely that early votes count for a hell of a lot, and so memes/pictures get those early votes much earlier than discussion posts do - because it’s much quicker to look at a picture, than it is to read a long text post.

                  So the good thing about smaller (especially smaller and well-moderated) communities, is that there’s enough space for text posts to breathe, without competing with memes for vote ascension space. But that doesn’t erase the problem of meme/image supremacy in r/all and r/popular.

    • Pisck@lemmy.mlEnglish
      72·
      2 years ago

      This is where the duplicated communities in lemmy’s federation works for you. As the big instances get flooded with content that is low quality but highly upvoted (as happens in big subreddits), you can also subscribe to communities about the same topic from smaller instances.

    • sw4nky@lemmy.oneEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      I think the nature of the fediverse ends up serving as a barrier to entry to the “average” social media user. This is probably why Mastodon hasn’t replaced Twitter despite all the dumb things that they have done with the site. As much as people dislike the idea of gatekeeping, I think a moderate amount is necessary to prevent a lot of low effort content that gets promoted on other platforms.

      As someone who has been on Reddit for the past 10 years or so, I noticed a dip in quality of r/all and a change in the community when new Reddit came out. Probably because the UI of new Reddit seemed to be geared toward a “feed” style of content consumption, similar to FB or Twitter, so people from those platforms started joining in large numbers and changing the culture. It seems like the recent migration/exodus from Reddit comes mainly from old.reddit users who value discussion and the “forum” style more (new.reddit users probably don’t care about 3rd party apps since they just use the official app anyway), so hopefully the quality of content and discussions doesn’t suffer too much.